Notes on the Champions League Final – Coming Saturday

Saturday’s UEFA Champions League Final will be the first all-German affair. Borussia Dortmund are the underdogs to Bayern Munich. Jurgen Klopp, Dortmund’s maverick coach, describes his players as a “workers’ team.” Class works.

Bayern, robust in red, cruising on French and Dutch wings. Gallic Franck Ribery flies down the left, Dutchman Arjen Robben balancing Bayern out on the right. Name, Bastian Schweinsteiger, in the middle. He can turn games. Hurling from the back, captain, Philipp Lamm. A giant in the Munich goalmouth, Manuel Neuer. Klopp’s workers must file the tools.

Poland’s Robert Lewandowski is Borussia’s goal maker, luxury play. His teammates go at it hammer and tongs. Klopp wants them to jump higher, a horse need not just clear the fence, he says.

Bayern demands to win the race. Too often in recent years they have fell at the last. Last season, England’s Chelsea robbed them with the crime of penalty kicks in the Final. Revenge is not a motivator. No one wins thinking that way.

The ball is not for equations. In play, this plus that does not equal winning. It works only on paper. Balls have their own way. No one is safe from their sum. Not even Bayern. The Bavarians can only follow Klopp’s philosophy and work and hope by jumping higher.

Guest blogger Luke James looks at Wembley Stadium, the home of English football, the venue for Saturday’s game.

To the soccer world, Wembley is a stadium as legendary as Yankee Stadium is to baseball. The old Wembley stadium was the place where millions of English schoolboys had their dreams suddenly made real – we won! – or stomped into the hallowed turf by tears of losing grief.

The famous twin white towers of the stadium, topped with Union Jack flags, opened in 1923, costing £750,000 ($1.53m) with an original capacity of 127,000. It was at Wembley in 1966 that England won the World Cup by defeating the then West Germany 4-2, in a game that suddenly made real all the propaganda English dads had been telling their boys about England being somehow “better” than the rest of the world. It closed in 2000 and was demolished in 2003. Wembley Stadium, not England. Then again …

The new Wembley Stadium that rose from the rubble cost £798 million ($1,560m) to build, has a seated capacity of 90,000 and, perhaps more importantly, can serve 40,000 pints of beer in a 15-minute halftime period. Although it’s likely Bayern and Dortmund fans will wish they’d been allowed to bring their own beer, fearing that warm English ale. They will nevertheless be grateful there are 2,618 toilets in the stadium.

German tourists have a reputation for getting up well before dawn to stake their claim on poolside sun loungers by placing their towels there before going to breakfast. Wembley ground staff have been alerted to collect any towels found on stadium seats prior to the game. It’s believed a deal has been arranged by UEFA to exchange the towels for decent German beer.